“Photography is the process of discovering the other and, through the other, oneself. Intrinsically, that is why the photographer seeks and discovers new worlds but in the end always shows what is inside himself.” —Claudia Andujar As a child, Claudia Andujar laid awake and listened silently for the spirits the servants were certain inhabited […]
“The de-anthropocentric consideration of nature, of particle, of process is necessary to discuss the framing of new non-human realities” Let’s consider an alternative version of history that is based on material instead of human folly. There must be a history individuated for the way in which non-animate objects such as petroleum, electricity, and […]
“The fridge was loud, but outside it was quiet, much quieter.” There is a literal wall of language separating the two halves of Michael Schmidt’s landmark photobook Waffenruhe (published in 1987 and reprinted in 2018), a visually sprawling text that spans seventeen pages at the center of the book. Despite the text’s […]
Professional photographers are typically trained to hide the mutability of digital images, covering up their handiwork to make their subjects look perfect, moreso than reality itself. Cobayashi toys with this mutability. Swirled up buildings, highways and hair all come together in an ecstatic mix of street fashion-shoot, slice-of-life and cityscape. You can trace the […]
“The photobook is a balance, at least its the intention, between this utopia (or maybe call it heterotopia, a concept made up by Foucault) and a life experience…” Fordlândia is an incredible book. IT is an imagined place where the 20th Century’s technological and capitalist utopian visions collide with the reality of the […]
“It would be easy for me to say that this book is published at the right moment and that it correlates a simple reminder about the inhuman conditions of the past…” It is June 9th, 2020 and as I sit here penning this “review” of Gordon Parks perhaps sadly non-anachronistic and oddly prescient […]
“All are slightly queasy in appearance, the Technicolor saturation making the images unbelievable to some extent, which adds to the delirium of her dream state”. High-intensity color saturation in a photograph creates something of a parallel universe in which things can feel positively uncanny. I would suggest that in terms of historical notation […]
“I exhibit a strange tendency in airports to curse, eyeball other people with malice and regard the general process of shuttling and hefting my mass through antiseptic tunnels and bizarre space age flat Jetson walklavators with contempt…” A commonality between train stations and photography is the architecture of waiting. Waiting can be read in […]
“Many photographers will know that moment when they cross the path of the sun beaming down from a fifth story window-some will not even see it, they will feel the change of luminescence on their cheek, their hair will feel warmer as they pace” The is a debilitating moment for many photographers […]
“To pass the time, many people have taken to Internet sharing services to commune with friends in chat rooms, exhibit work through virtual galleries and to sift through and curate (cause why not) their Internet presence as time allows” There are a host of reasons why Bill Sullivan’s “Self Portrait with Mirrors” (Sun […]
“I’d been playing drums in a few bands, Th’ Faith Healers and Stereolab among others, and between tours and photo jobs I’d take off on photo projects of my own, often to Berlin. Eventually I got a place in Berlin, because I realised it had a lot of what London was losing, it’s a […]
“The historical representations of architectural photography deal in large measure with style and period, but are also concerned with the history that passes through the buildings within the frame”. There are antecedents to every photograph produced in the present day. In the case of architectural photography, there are many ways in which we can […]